The Holy Crown Caper of 1440
Helene Kottanner’s dramatic eye-witness narrative of castle intrigue corrects history by including women
Few contemporaneous histories of 15th century Hungary exist, but I doubt any match the cinematic force of Helene Kottanner’s Memoirs, one of the oldest known prose texts written by a woman.1 According to the Memoirs, the Habsburg Queen Elizabeth, recently widowed and heavily pregnant, asked Kottanner to steal the Holy Crown from a locked vault. Elizabeth needed the crown to legitimize her son’s coronation and prevent a court faction from putting the Polish King Vladislaus III on the Hungarian throne. Kottanner recorded the crown’s theft and the swift coronation of an infant king, events in which she played a starring role.
More mystery surrounds the Memoirs themselves, which end mid-sentence, and which remained in obscurity for four centuries. Kottanner, who was Austrian and spoke little Hungarian, was likely illiterate, as most Hungarians were—so who wrote the Memoirs, and are they a truthful telling of these events?
Two women
Helene Kottanner was born around 1400 in the Austrian town of Ödenburg to a family of minor nobility. She married an Hungarian patrician who died when she was 30. A year later she married Johann Kottanner. They had several children, one of whom (Katharina) Helene mentions in her Memoirs.
Elizabeth of Luxembourg was the only child of The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, king of Hungary and Bohemia. Elizabeth married King Albert of Austria. When Sigismund died, the Hungarian nobility elected Albert and Elizabeth to rule Hungary.
By 1436, Helene Kottanner was in King Albert’s Austrian court serving Queen Elizabeth, likely taking care of household matters such as being a wet nurse, sewing, dressing the queen, taking care of the royal children, and tending to whatever needs came up on a given day—much of which Helene records in her Memoirs. Helene was therefore one of the women in the Queen’s intimate circle whom Elizabeth saw daily.
Queen Elizabeth had borne two girls and was pregnant with a third child when King Albert died of dysentery in 1439. Sigismund had raised Elizabeth with an expectation of a royal destiny. Upon her husband’s death, Elizabeth moved quickly to claim the regency for herself. However, while the powerful magnates of Hungary who made up its Diet (legislative body) had been happy enough with Elizabeth when Albert was alive, they couldn’t bring themselves to support her claim. They argued that Hungary needed a vigorous, battle-ready king who could stand up to the Ottoman Empire, which had been making incursions into Hungary. They liked their odds with Poland’s Vladislaus better. He was young, not yet 20, and more importantly, he was male. No one knew whether Elizabeth would deliver a son or a daughter, and even if she birthed a son, Elizabeth would be their de facto ruler until the son matured. The Hungarian Diet couldn’t accept a woman’s rule.
Elizabeth’s strategy to stay in power relied on several contingencies. She really needed to deliver a male heir, and that child had to survive birth and childhood, neither of which were certainties at the time. She also needed the coronation to be legitimate and incapable of being challenged. For this, she needed the Holy Crown.
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
The Holy Crown
The apocryphal history2 of this crown has it being sent in the year 1000 by the Pope to St. Stephen (Istvan), the king and patron saint of Hungary from 997 to 1038. From the 13th century, it was thought to be a sacred symbol of Hungary, and it was required for a coronation to be considered legitimate.
For the Polish Vladislaus to become king of Hungary required more than the overwhelming support of the Diet and even of the Hungarian people. He needed more than the other paraphernalia like the royal sceptre. For unchallengeable legitimacy, he must wear the Holy Crown. Elizabeth’s plans therefore required that she gain access to the Holy Crown before the opposition could crown Vladislaus with it.
And if there was to be a race for seizing the Crown, Elizabeth had to appear to have no interest in it. She decided to achieve this through misdirection.
With the death of the keeper of the crown, Albert had moved the Holy Crown and other royal insignia to the Plintenburg stronghold for safekeeping. During this ceremonious event, the king and queen, accompanied by their young daughter, held by Helene Kottanner, watched with other nobility as the royal treasures were secured in the Plintenburg vault. The vault was locked and sealed. The keys were given to a new keeper of the crown.
Months later and newly widowed, the queen grew alarmed by rumors that Albert had removed the crowns and hidden them in a place unknown to her. Since Elizabeth’s plan hinged on having the Holy Crown to legitimize her child’s ascension to the throne, she ordered the vault opened. The rumors had been false. Elizabeth removed the crowns to her bedchamber, only to have a fire break out in her rooms that night, endangering the crowns. Elizabeth decided to put them back into the vault. She had multiple seals placed on the vault’s locks, and entrusted the keys to her hand-picked keeper, her cousin Ladislaus Garai. He wrapped the vault’s seals in linen and placed another seal on the linen bag. With the crowns and Plintenburg safely under her control, Elizabeth moved her household away to Komorn, creating distance and deniability for her next steps.
The caper
The queen planned to have the Holy Crown removed from Plintenburg and brought to her soon before she delivered her child. She selected ‘mother Kottaner,’ her trusted servant, for the job. She picked well: Kottanner proved to be crafty and courageous, as well as having unassailable virtue. Kottanner obtained the vault keys and the queen’s signet ring for resealing the vault. She enlisted a man to help her with the theft. The first man she selected grew wary and decamped. Her second choice, whom she doesn’t name, proved worthy to the task.
Helene Kottanner and the unnamed man traveled to Plintenburg. She knew the castle well, and was able to direct them to the vault. Kottanner stood guard while the man and his helper worked to open the vault. During the break-in, Helene heard noises outside the room; she prayed that God would intervene, thereby acknowledging the righteousness of their efforts. The noises subsided and she went to look outside the door; all was well. The men successfully opened the vault, removed the Holy Crown, and re-locked and resealed the vault so that it appeared to be untampered.
Helene and the man hid the crown in a pillow and placed it in a sled they used to travel to Komorn. The journey, which required crossing the ice-covered Danube river, was eventful: one carriage crashed through the ice and its occupants had to be rescued from the river. Although Helene feared for the crown’s safety, they succeeded in bringing the treasure to the queen. Within an hour of receiving the crown, the queen gave birth to a son, whom she named Ladislaus Posthumous (since he’d been born after the death of his father). When he was 12 weeks old, the infant Ladislaus was entrusted to Helene’s care for the journey to Stuhlweissenburg, the Hungarian coronation city. There, Helene held the baby as the crown was held over his head and declared the King of Hungary.
The Hungarian nobility who supported the Polish Vladislaus had him crowned as king, but they could do so only without the Holy Crown, which was in Elizabeth’s possession. Baby Ladislaus became the legitimate King of Hungary, by virtue of the Holy Crown and Helene Kottanner’s surreptitious attainment of it.
The grateful queen promised to reward Kottanner for helping to ensure her son’s ascension to the throne and her own place as royal consort. Elizabeth died a few years later, before she had followed through on her promise of a reward. Years later, Helene and her husband were granted land in acknowledgement of the queen’s duty to them.
Helene’s Memoirs were written sometime between the queen’s death and receiving the reward, so it’s possible to view the Memoirs as documentation of a debt owed by the queen, and by extension the state. The Memoirs document several times that the queen explicitly told Helene she would be compensated for her part in the king’s coronation. It also details Helene’s own virtuousness in her efforts to serve the queen, which could be seen as a character reference to assuage any doubts in paying her for what was in fact a criminal act. If this is indeed the only intent of the Memoirs, it needn’t have been written so entertainingly.
Helene herself was likely illiterate, and had limited understanding of the Hungarian language. She likely paid a scribe to transcribe her story, one who was fluent in German (the language of the text), but not in Hungarian.3 Adding to the intrigue, the document ends abruptly, mid sentence. Why was it not finished, if the document’s purpose was to secure what was owed to her?
Women telling tales
Consider this passage, describing the events after Helene and her accomplice (“he who shared my anxiety”) left the castle with the crown embedded in the pillow:
“ When the queen’s ladies and her entire retinue were ready to ride off, he who shared my anxiety took the pillow with the Holy Crown sewn inside it and ordered his helper to carry the pillow out of the castle onto the sled in which he and I were to sit. So then the good fellow took the pillow on his shoulders and put over it an old cowhide with a long tail which dangled behind him. And all the people followed him with their eyes and began to laugh. When we had come down from the castle and reached the market, we would have like to have eat, but all we could find was herring, so we ate a little of that. And when we finished singing the mass, the hour was already far advanced, and we still had to travel from Plintenburg to Komorn that day, which we did, even though this is a distance of twelve miles. When we were about to ride off and taking our seats, I quickly felt over the pillow to know where the Holy Crown was so I would not sit down on it. And I thanked God Almighty for His mercy, although I kept looking back frequently for fear that anyone might be following us. Indeed, I worried incessantly, and thoughts were crowding in my mind, and I marveled at what God had done or might still do.”
Translated by Maya Bijvoet Williamson
Once she reaches Komorn, Helene describes being received by the queen, who filled her in on ‘the events of the day.’ Two of her ladies had arrived with a midwife and wet-nurse, who had brought along her son, which by custom proved the quality of her milk.4 The queen had planned for the women who would assist the birth to travel with her to Pressburg for the delivery, which was expected to occur the following week. As Helene puts it, “It may be that the calculations were wrong, or that God willed otherwise….”
“As I was talking to the noble queen like this, her grace told me that the women from Ofen had bathed her in a tub and that after the bath she had felt quite unwell. Hence I lifted up her gown to see her naked. Then I saw several signs that showed me clearly that the birth of the child was not far off.”
Although some historians have claimed the Memoirs were written by a man because Helene Kottanner was illiterate, the text speaks convincingly of knowledge that only Helene, or a woman situated very close to the queen, would have. She names the ladies from Ofen as well as many noblemen who play a part in the story, any one of whom could have discredited her account if they wanted to dispute the facts. The author of the text has intimate knowledge of the palaces it describes and with the duties of the women serving the queen. The author displays some expertise in sewing and knowledge of midwifery.
If her intent was merely to record a debt owed her and plead for its payment, the document could have been much shorter. The author would have a financial incentive to finish it so that she could tender it for payment. Instead, the document appears to be exactly as its title suggests: memories of an episode that was memorable not only personally but to history itself.
Helene would have been about 50 years old when the text was written down. Her children would have been adults, with children of their own. Those who would have remembered her part in the king’s coronation were dead or in their final years. She likely had regaled her family with the stories from this epic part of her life, but she may have wanted more. She may have had an eye to history when she paid a scribe to write down her story: although it’s unlikely her children were literate, she could have hoped that future generations would be so fortunate to be able to read. And then life got in the way, and she abandoned her project. Her family would have preserved the pages as best they could, but over generations the document would have become less meaningful without the ability to read it. Eventually, the papers turned up in just the right hands, and the discovery was made.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story isn’t the nighttime theft of the crown, nor Helene’s intrepid efforts to ensure both the crown and the young king made it to the coronation, but in its depiction of the relationship between the queen and Helene. Elizabeth was raised to be a queen or royal consort. Helene wasn’t from a powerful family; she didn’t have political connections for Elizabeth to leverage. Yet the queen repeatedly turns to Helene for help and advise. She calls her ‘mother Kottanner,’ an endearment of respect for an older, wiser woman. She selects Helene to lead the caper, and gives her responsibility for selecting an assistant.
The queen also relied on Helene’s wisdom. One night, the queen sends for Helene, who finds her queen in distress over rumors that enemy forces were planning to attack and steal the crown. Helene suggests that they could bury the crown in the garden. The queen said she’d considered that, but if her enemies found that the crown was missing, they could claim it was lost, which could be used to justify the Polish king’s right to the Hungarian throne. After thinking about the problem for awhile, Helene advises the queen to keep the crown with the baby king, securing it in the cradle under the straw (“because his grace did not sleep on feathers yet”). To complete the misdirection, she places a long handled spoon—one that was commonly used to make mash for babies—next to it on the straw: “they would think that what lay there was something to prepare the noble king’s food with, and no one knew anything about this at the time except my noble lady and myself.”
What emerges is a picture of a queen who has the support of only a handful of powerful men, facing an array of noblemen who sought to unseat her son and strip her of title and lands. She lives from day to day amongst noble women whose political connections could be suspect, and other female servants. One of these is clearly intelligent, nervy, and thoroughly loyal. A strategic thinker, Elizabeth knows she must plan carefully and trust very few. When she brings Helene into her trust, she speaks to her woman-to-woman, as equal as a queen and a non-royal can be.
Her story
Those who write history claim the right to shape it. Contemporaneous medieval historians based their accounts on legal documents that codified the transfers of power and transitions that make up the historical timeline. They’re not written for entertainment value, nor to explore the psychological motivations of the historical actors. They exist to provide a factual accounting, as if deducting emotion from any human story renders it more, rather than less, accurate. This was the state of medieval history writing at the time Helene Kottanner set her thoughts down for posterity.
The Hungarian people knew that the Holy Crown had been stolen from its Plintenburg strong room, but not even the queen knew the details of what happened, since Helene admits she had no time to tell the story to the queen before the queen’s death a few years later. Helene’s Memoirs only came to light in 1834 when an Hungarian historian, Johann Czéch, published a paper about it.5
A prominent 15th century Hungarian and Austrian chronicler, Jakob Unrest, stated his purpose in writing chronicles was “to preserve worthy deeds, to honor the nobility, to edify the common man, and to understand the past, present and the future. His histories are traditional and patriarchal, barely reporting on Elizabeth or other female rulers.”6 An Hungarian chronicler of the same period, János Thuróczy, writing in Latin, preferred to interpret the history he documented through his political and subjective lens. His version of Queen Elizabeth is thoroughly fictional. Here she is, at least in the mind of Thuróczy:7
“I am, as you know, the kingdom’s heiress, but I do not think I am strong enough to guide the reins of the kingdom. If you are looking forward to the birth of my child, I believe I shall deliver a daughter rather than a son, to the extent that my woman’s nature can know this from experience. Try, therefore, to find for yourself a prince who is more qualified than a woman to bear the responsibilities of so great a realm, keeping in your ears and before your eyes the kindnesses of my father, lest you arrange for me to have no share in the kingdom of him whose daughter I am.”
Thuróczy goes on to say that the Hungarian magnates, lit by the Queen’s words, unanimously acclaimed the new king. This is factually false. That Thuróczy was an acclaimed chronicler of his time speaks to the standards of historians in a place of very low literacy.
Neither Unrest nor Thuróczy mentions Kottanner, although they wrote after her Memoirs were created, which suggests that either her document wasn’t widely circulated, or they dismissed its relevance. Helene Kottanner’s depiction of Elizabeth soundly contradicts the version of history Thuróczy later flogged, and Unrest didn’t think the queen deserved attention. These two male chroniclers served the patriarchy: they labored to extol the great male actors of their history to promote the male power structure. Kottanner’s Memoirs challenges their versions of history that obliterate the real presence of women in political and cultural events.
The German title of Helene Kottanner’s text translates as “things worthy to be remembered.” Her text paints a vivid recollection of events she participated in, events that were airbrushed out of the emerging chronicles of her day. She is stating: this mattered. What the queen did mattered. What I did mattered. The actions of these two women changed the course of Hungarian history, if only for the brief length of the young king’s life. This is how history is made, with small adjustments here and there, altering the course of events. A few things worth being remembered.
The talkative middle-aged woman is a comic trope, dating back to the use of ‘gossip’ (god-sibb or godparent) to mean a woman attending the birth of a child, presumably engaged in idle talk with other women. Women talk when they’re together. They form bonds through the stories they tell. They share with each other what they cannot with children or the men in their lives, who cannot understand if they even listen. Women become adept at telling stories, their own stories. The ones known only in the group.
Helene Kottanner was one of those story telling women. She took the next bold step: she committed her stories, worthy to be remembered, to paper. Because she did, we have a fragment that fills in the gaps of the patriarchal historical record that had previously erased any female actors, even one who ruled a kingdom and one who helped crown an infant king.
Ellie’s Corner
After a health scare last month, Ellie’s been on a diet to reduce the load on her joints; she’s also taking supplements for her aging bones. She’s lost a bit of weight (noticeable only, I fear, on the scales so far), and either that or the supplements are working some kind of magic. She’s become frisky again, despite the cold weather (she’s a fair weather gal). Whatever the reason, we’re happy that she is.
Thanks for reading,
Maya Bijvoet Williamson, “Preface”, The Memoirs of Helene Kottanner, D S Brewer: Cambridge,1998. Readers of this ‘Shut Out Not Shut Up’ series will recognize this tired effort to discredit women writers. Anonymous may have been a woman, as Virginia Woolf quipped, but even signed work hasn’t prevented men from trying to steal women’s thoughts and words.
Historians claim that no part of the crown can date back to the 11th century, but its myth is more important than fact in the 15th century. As a holy symbol, it legitimized the ascension to rule over others.
The text includes a scene in which someone calls out in Hungarian; the words are written phonetically.
“… for the wise say that the milk of a woman who has given birth to a son is better than the milk of a woman who has brought forth a daughter.”
Williamson, “Preface,” p. ix.
Williamson, “Introduction,” p. 13.
Ibid, p. 11.